


Haunted

by Anonymous



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 10:09:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21426475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Michael plays hide-and-seek with ghosts.
Relationships: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Comments: 29
Kudos: 97
Collections: Anonymous





	Haunted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tasyfa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tasyfa/gifts).

> a small offering for Tasyfa, in thanks for commenting on everything, ever, since the beginning.

_i want to be haunted by the ghost  
__of your precious love _  
\- the pogues  
  
  
  
There are a lot of deaths in the course of a lifetime. Most people don’t notice. They think you die once and that’s it. But you have only to pay a bit of attention to realize—as Michael did—that you up and die every so often. It’s not just a poetic turn of phrase, and it has nothing to do with the soul, whatever that is. One day you cross the street and a car runs you down; another day you fall asleep in the bathtub and never get out; another, you tumble down the stairs and crack your skull open.

Most deaths don’t matter: the film goes on running. But some deaths _do_ matter—even if you don’t realize at the time—and that’s when everything takes a turn.

It’s that one day when you’re standing in your family’s diner and a racist motherfucker with a gun and a misplaced thirst for vengeance shoots you through your heart; another day a beautiful girl who acts like she’s got a crush on you but is really being mind-warped by a psychotic alien with an even _bigger_ crush on you lures you into a cave and grabs your face and somehow snuffs the life right out of you; another day your fucking brother-in-law stabs you in the neck with a piece of glass.

Or maybe you get too big for your boots and start thinking that you’re a god, _the _god, so you decide to go and bring a dead girl back to life, except it’s harder than you expected, and—_oh, shit_—you’re the one who winds up dying. Or maybe the love of your life _doesn’t _tell you that you’re his family, so you stay behind with your momma when the prison blows up. Or, you know, whatever.

Deaths.

It’s not like they mean forever.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Michael shares his theory of multiple deaths with Maria at the bar one day: “What happens, DeLuca, is that people die a bunch of times in a single life.”

“Okay,” Maria says, humoring him. She thinks he’s drunk, but he’s not, he’s really not. Only a little bit drunk. 

“People die, and they leave a ghost of themselves hanging around. And then both of ’em—the original and the ghost—they go on living. Each in their own right.”

“How can you tell who’s whose ghost?” she asks. 

“You can’t,” he tells her. “Maybe it’s me you’re talking to, maybe it’s one of my ghosts. You’ll never know.”

“How many do you have?”

“No offense, DeLuca, but that’s none of your fucking business.”

  
*

  
He told Alex he was starting over. With Maria.

Words were exchanged.

Alex said something about distance.

Michael said, “You’re not showing me the distance, Alex, you spent ten years creating it. Everything we say to each other, we’re sinking. You and me. I’m taking a goddamn lifeboat._”_

It’s not fair to Maria. But Maria doesn’t know he has—_had—_a mother, so hers is the only company that he can bear right now.

  
*

  
For years he used to imagine what he would say, if he could talk to Rosa again:

“Can I ask you a question?” 

_—Fire away. _

“What’s the last thing to disappear?”

_—What the hell are you talking about, Guerin? _

“Death, obviously.”

_—Did you know that certain animals can exist without their heads? _And she would laugh and laugh.

Now he _can _talk to Rosa again, because she’s not dead anymore.

“You’re a ghost, aren’t you?” she says, when Liz leaves the room for a moment.

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, because I can actually see you,” Rosa says.

He isn’t sure what she means by that.

  
*  
  
  
Michael visits Isobel in her empty echoing house. They don’t have much to say to one another these days, so they eat Chinese takeaway in near silence. Later that evening he develops a terrible pain in his chest, and despite his protestations, Isobel insists on calling Valenti.

Valenti shows up with his doctor bag; it takes him an inordinately long time to locate Michael’s heartbeat, and Michael wonders if the ghost is finally out of the bag, if everyone’s about to discover how deathly he is. But then Kyle hears some sign of life in his chest. He puts away his stethoscope and tells Michael he’s probably just overdosed on monosodium glutamate.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Maria gets a postcard from her ex, some guy named Chad. Reading it together, they laugh at the letter’s exaggerated syntax. Then they have sex and pretend that they have no past, either. But Michael can’t shake the impression that they’re rehearsing for the beginnings of the end—before-shocks, pre-tremblings.  
  
  
*  
  
  
The difference between being young and being old is the degree of frivolity in your relationship with death, he decides. Before his mom, before _Max_, his disdain for life was such that he was constantly imagining ever more extravagant deaths for himself. The bigger and louder he lived, the more of himself he put out into the world, the more ghostly he felt. 

He kind of liked it.

That went on for ten years.

But then his mom and Max died terrible extravagant deaths of their own, and, well, he couldn’t afford to be frivolous anymore. Not with Liz counting on him to bring Max back.  
  
  
*  
  
  
One of his ghosts was a real troublemaker.

This was the ghost that Max was always booking for drunk and disorderly back in the day. 

This was the ghost that was Michael cuffed in the back of the patrol car, doing his best Travis Bickle just to rile Max up: “All the animals come out at night—queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

“Damn it, Michael, you had to go and get drunk on me _again_, how d’you think Sheriff Valenti’s gonna like me for that, huh?” Max always liked that rhetorical “me” thing; it was as if everything were a conspiracy against his person. _Michael, why do you do these things to me? _

“Listen you fuckers, you screwheads: here is a man who would not take it anymore,” Michael—his ghost, rather—proclaimed, banging on the partition. “Deputy Evans is a man who stood up against the scum, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up!” 

This ghost has faded away, stopped coming around, since Max died.

Michael just doesn’t see the point anymore.  
  
  
*  
  
  
In _One Thousand and One Nights_, the narrator strings together a series of tales to put off the day of her death.

Michael does something similar during his relationship with Maria. The stakes are a little different, of course: the stories he tells are to keep her from discovering who and what he is, and then to put off the day when they will both have to accept that he is in love with Alex. Abidingly, immutably, eternally in love with Alex. 

But while Michael is stringing together piss-poor excuses for how his hand is suddenly normal and how that old thing between him and Alex is over and has been for years, a sort of reverse _One Thousand and One Nights _mechanism begins to take hold. Spinning his stories requires ever-increasing quantities of alcohol. The mesh of his immediate reality begins to wear thin. The fibers of fiction start to modify reality instead of vice versa.

He is twenty-eight. He doesn’t need to be a genius to grasp it isn’t just his chances of becoming a rockstar before he turns thirty that are dwindling away—it’s his chances of living to see thirty at all.

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky. Major Tom is a junkie, all right.

Strung out on heaven’s high, hitting an  
all  
time  
low.

Michael—all the many Michaels that make up his constellation—is disappearing. He’s hollowing out. He wonders how many deaths he has left. Three? No. The next one will be the real thing, he thinks.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Despite all his practice, he isn’t ready.  
  
  
*  
  
  
His _thing _with Alex was like a game of hide-and-seek in an enormous old house full of nooks and crannies and holes. The roles were always shifting, neither of them really knowing who was hiding and who was seeking, whose turn it was to shout, “_Found_!”  
  
  
*  
  
  
He breaks up with Maria.  
  
  
He tells her that he’s turned into a ghost, or that maybe he’s the only person left alive in a world of ghosts, but that in any case, he doesn’t like dying all the time.

She strokes his forehead. He doesn’t know what to do. Spontaneous gestures of kindness have always paralyzed him. He wishes he could tell her that he’s breaking up with her because he’s no longer capable of sustaining and inhabiting the worlds he himself has fabricated.  
  
  
*  
  
  
_my mother said, to get things done  
__you’d better not mess with Major Tom_

There was this one night when he hooked up with a woman he met at the Pony. She took him back to her hotel room and what followed was a blank. What he _did _recall was waking up in a horror of confusion, his body smeared alarmingly in her orange fake tan. “What the fuck?” he yelped, slapping at his discolored skin. “What the…”

He groped blindly for his phone. There was a news banner across his screen that said David Bowie was dead.

_my mother said to get things done  
__you’d better not mess with—_  
  
  
*  
  
  
He and Rosa get high for old times’ sake. She tells him that if you cut a cockroach’s head off, it goes on living for two weeks. He gets a fit of giggles. So does she. They’re still laughing and trying to remember the words to the cucaracha song when Liz comes upstairs and finds them sprawled across the floor of Rosa’s bedroom. She yells at Michael and kicks him out.

He ends up drinking with Valenti that night, and in a wave of sentimentality that comes with too much alcohol, he flings his arm around Valenti’s shoulders and tells him he’s not bad for a real sonofabitch and he hopes that one day they’ll be ghosts on the same interstate, so they can at least wave to each other from opposite directions for the rest of eternity.

“God forbid,” Kyle replies.  
  
  
*  
  
  
_The difference between being alive and being dead is just a matter of viewpoint._

That was something he overheard Mimi DeLuca say while she was reading a customer’s palm at the bar.

Mimi said: “The living look from the center outward, the dead from the periphery to some sort of center.”

The DeLuca racket—palmistry, astrology, whatever—was a load of bull, you didn’t have to be an alien to see that, but her words struck a chord with him that night. They confirmed what he’d always suspected, that he moved through life like he was already dead, looking inward from the outside, from someplace to nowhere.  
  
  
*  
  
  
He sits shivering in his airstream, wrapped in a blanket, drafting text messages to Alex that he knows he’ll never send.

It’s hard to think about forever in a life where hardly anyone definitively dies.

Michael moves his aloe vera plant to the windowsill, where it has a better chance of catching a few rays of winter sun, and writes letters to Alex as if they were both already ghosts.

It’s not enough to keep him sober, so he moves in with Isobel for a few weeks. Isobel is plumbing the depths of her co-dependency with their dead brother; she presents it to Michael, in nearly identical form, as if she were offering him a precious gift. He lets her down as gently as he can. Isobel, he thinks privately, is like a Narcissus who’d read Freud but, instead of being horrified, had been moved. 

When he comes back to the airstream, his aloe vera has up and died. It’s completely withered—as if years have passed instead of scarcely two weeks. Its sudden, absolute death makes him sad, it seems so prophetic in its way, that he takes it out to the scrapyard and abandons it on top of a rusted engine.  
  
  
*  
  
  
A memory, circa 2010:

—_Alex. What’re you doing in there? _

—_I… I don’t know. Sitting. _

—_Okay. _

—_ What are you—Guerin—_

—_I’m getting in with you. _

He can’t get it out of his head.  
  
  
*  
  
  
When Alex comes home, Michael is sitting in his empty bathtub. He’s fully dressed; his boots have left muddy prints on the tile. He knows he looks like shit. Dark circles under his eyes, the haggard planes of his face thrown into sharp relief by unforgiving fluorescent lights. The ghost of a drowned man.

“D’you remember this?” he rasps. His voice sounds like rocks scraping together. “Crappy motel room. Our last night together before you left for Iraq. I got in the tub with you. And I held you. And I told you stupid jokes. And we shit-talked your dad. And we laughed. And we kissed. And you were just—”

“I was mended,” Alex says.

He obviously has no clue what Michael is doing in his cabin. In his bathtub. They haven’t spoken in weeks. _Everything we say to each other, we’re sinking, you and me. I’m taking a goddamn lifeboat. _

Alex clears his throat. “You mended me. For a few hours at least.”

“Yeah? I was gonna say the other way around. That you put _me_ back together. At least until you fucked off again.”

“Guerin…” Alex sits on the side of the tub. Michael extends his hand, and Alex takes it. He clambers into the tub with him and Michael moves his legs and Alex manages to settle opposite him with their knees interlocking. “I know,” Alex says. “And I’m sorry. It took me all these years to understand how much… _power_, I guess, I had over you. Because I’d never felt like that before. That somebody could need me. That they could want me like that.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“The stakes—… The stakes have always been so high between us. There was never… any lifeboat?”

He shakes his head.

“And I think maybe—that it was too much? Or maybe we were too young?”

He nods.

Alex says: “I think it’s a problem that you’re this big a part of who I am. How I function. You know?”

He coughs, a harsh, grating sound. His lips are dry and chapped. “Sometimes,” he says and coughs again, “Sometimes. When I’m really lost. I imagine your voice. Not my own. Your… whisper? Rattling round and round in my head. You fucking… haunt me. And I know it shouldn’t be like that. But that’s all there is. That’s what we _made_, Alex.”

He blinks, and a single stupid tear runs down his cheek. Alex leans forward and wipes it away. Then there is another tear, and another, and for a minute Alex’s thumbs are kept busy wiping away all his tears. And then they stop. Sudden, like their source has dried up. His tongue lies in his mouth dry and swollen as a drought-struck riverbed.

“We could keep making it,” he croaks at last. “If you want to.”

“Do you love me?” Alex asks.

“I think I’ll love you until I die,” Michael answers.

Alex leans forward and takes his face in his hands. Kisses his chapped lips. Michael kisses him back. After they separate to breathe, Alex keeps his fingers knotted in the sweaty curls at the nape of his neck.

“You look like a ghost,” Alex murmurs. “Promise it’s really you?”

“I think so.”

“Is this a good time to ask what you were doing, sitting in my bathtub and looking like hell?”

“Oh.” Michael blinks at him sluggishly. “I brought Max back.”

“You—_what_?” Alex gapes at him. “Just—just now?”

“Couple hours ago. Yep yep yyyyep.” Michael droops, bones turning to dust as he dissolves against Alex in a dead faint.  
  
  
*  
  
  
There was an earthquake when he brought Max back, Alex tells him later. Alex was down in the bunker with Kyle when it happened. At first it was just a slight dizziness, Alex says, a sort of presentiment. Next, the internal and then external shuddering of objects. Trembling. Everything trembled, the ground creaked, and an expensive computer monitor plunged to the floor. Books fell from the shelves, first a few and then a cascade. And then nothing, Alex says. An unfamiliar kind of stillness. As soon as he and Kyle were sure the trembling had stopped, the aftershocks had passed, they tried to leave the bunker but the door was jammed, something had fallen across it. Kyle called his mom, and while they waited to be let out, they picked through the debris. They found a Buzz Lightyear, a dummy, a foam-rubber brontosaurus. Vestiges of someone else’s childhood. Not Alex’s.  
  
  
*  
  
  
“It’s a power I don’t think _anybody _should have,” Michael says.

He’s sitting in the bathtub again. But this time he’s naked and the tub has water in it and Alex is sitting on the toilet taking off his prosthesis so he can join him. Michael’s whole body aches, the flesh pulpy beneath his skin like an overripe apple. His wet hand grasps Alex’s, and Alex lets his powers do the balancing for him as he eases into the tub too.

“I’m glad I don’t remember it,” Michael goes on. “It’s a total black hole in my memory, what it felt like—the transference of energy or whatever. The earthquake. Liz told me once that not being able to remember is like a PTSD thing, but—this is different, maybe?”

“Maybe,” Alex agrees.

Michael drapes one of his legs over the side of the tub and tugs Alex forward to lie on top of him. Alex settles obligingly against his chest, and Michael wraps his arms around him.

“Maybe it’s my brain saving me from myself,” he ruminates. He knows he ought to let this be a quiet moment between them. A reprieve after everything they’ve been through. A respite after their exertions in the bedroom, getting reacquainted with one another’s bodies. But peace and tranquility seldom prevail with him, and he can’t shut up for long: “’Cause Max went insane with it, the killing and the resurrecting. So maybe my brain was like, ‘Nope, sorry, dumbass, you don’t get to remember this, lest ye be tempted to keep on playing alien god’ or some shit like that.”

The water sloshes around their bodies as Alex presses closer.

“You’re real,” he says, and it sounds like a question and a statement.

“You tell me.” Michael tightens his arms, whether to affirm his existence or just to flex his muscles, he isn’t entirely sure. Alex turns his head to kiss his bicep, which is probably more goodwill than he deserves.

“The laws of nature go to pieces the second you walk into a room,” Alex says. “Sometimes I think you’re a ghost who only exists in my head, and sometimes you’re such an alien it blows my mind that you’ve gotten away with it all these years.”

“Hiding in plain sight. Just like you.”

“Like me?” Alex frowns. “How do you mean? If you’re talking about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, that’s not really—”

“You’re a slippery sonofabitch, Alex,” Michael says bluntly. “Maybe you’re not as _good _as you pretend to be sometimes, but you’re not as fucking stoic, either.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Alex demands, temper sparking in his eyes. 

“That’s not what we do,” Michael reminds him. “We don’t make each other feel better. We see each other. Always.”

“And what do you see?”

“You’re a tough person to love.”

“That’s what you see? That I’m _a tough person to love_. Fuck you, Michael.” Alex tries to push off his chest, but Michael won’t let him go.

“Maybe I should’ve worded that differently,” he says, mouth twitching a little. 

“You’re one to talk, anyway,” Alex tells him grumpily, but he relaxes ever so slightly into his arms. 

“Oh sweetheart, don’t I know it. We were _made _for each other.” He cradles Alex’s cheek in his hand and draws him in for a lazy, shallow kiss. His other hand he maneuvers between them to wrap around Alex’s cock. Which is hard, has been for a while, and yeah, Michael is too, even as they argued, which isn’t to detract from the sincerity of any of the sentiments expressed whilst they were arguing, it’s just a testament to how much Alex turns him on.

“I’m still open for you,” he says. “All wet and slippery, too, if you wanna get in on this.”

Alex moans, and Michael smiles. He makes more room for Alex between his legs, both knees hooked over the sides of the tub now. The medicine cabinet flies open as he calls for the box of condoms with his mind. Then a damp fumble with foil and latex. Breathing in shallow gulps of air as Alex inches inside him again. Watching Alex’s face, the expression of fixed concentration giving way to delight at how fucking good it feels. His whole body shudders when Alex bottoms out, and Alex’s eyes widen. A kind of awe creeping into them as he looks down at Michael, testing the caged animal ferocity of the body beneath him.

When Alex finally fucks him, though, it’s the surreality of the moment that Michael can’t escape. He becomes wild and vulnerable under Alex. Taking and taking and taking, after so many months spent depleting himself, growing more insubstantial with every passing day. The more Alex gives him, the less ghostly he feels. 

“Harder,” he commands. “Fuck me harder, Alex.”

And, a few minutes later: “More. I want more. I can take it. Give me more—”

Bending air and water and mass and gravity to his will, safe in the knowledge that Alex’s leg isn’t hurting him, a tender cushion of air and water around the residual limb to protect it from everything he is demanding of Alex.

He runs his hand down Alex’s spine, over his ass, and crooks one finger inside of him. Not the whole thing, he doesn’t have the angle, but it’s enough to send a pulse of electricity surging through Alex’s whole frame. He thrusts deeper than he’s gone before and Michael brings his hips up and there, _that_ is perfection.

He hangs on for as long as he can. But when the tears start gathering in his eyes from the effort of holding back, he remembers that he doesn’t have to, that Alex is giving this to him and he can take his pleasure as selfishly as he wants tonight. He comes with a hand around his cock, splashing so much water over the sides that there’s probably more on the floor than in the tub by the time he’s through. He curls the finger still inside Alex, and Alex—Alex comes too. Filling the condom, filling Michael, and god he takes it, every last drop.  
  
  
*  
  
  
When Michael was seventeen, he borrowed Alex’s guitar and moved into his shed and within a week he’d fallen so hard he thought he’d discovered a new kind of love. Alex was more real to him than anyone he’d ever known, realer in some ways than Max and Isobel, realer than _Michael_, and he began to wonder if maybe Alex was imagining _him._

Or maybe they were both ghosts, him and Alex, in search of some way back to the real.  
  
  
*  
  
  
The difference between being alive and being dead is just a matter of viewpoint, and his paradigm has shifted. He seldom feels like he’s on the periphery anymore; he feels like the Michael who is in bed with Alex right now. He has a sister named Isobel and a brother named Max and friends named Liz and Rosa and Kyle and maybe Maria will be his friend again, too, someday. He’s strung out on happiness, most of the time, and isn’t _that_ a fucking trip.

Which isn’t to say it’s easy; sometimes he still finds himself looking inward from the outside. Even now, when Alex is sleeping and he could also be asleep, but isn’t, because he’s thinking about all his deaths and all his ghosts and it starts to become too much and he feels that their bed is not a bed, these hands are not his hands. Falling fast from someplace into nowhere.

So he kisses Alex awake, coaxes him open, and slips inside. Their breaths mingle, the heat of his body entering and shaking Alex’s. A soft laugh; one of them whispers, “_Found_.”

**Author's Note:**

> music credz: David Bowie is everywhere. 
> 
> \--Index--
> 
> HALLO SPACEBOY (archiveofourown.org/works/18249017)  
BOYS KEEP SWINGING (archiveofourown.org/works/18279641)  
WHAT YOU BREAK IS WHAT YOU GET (archiveofourown.org/works/18446210)  
SATELLITE'S GONE (archiveofourown.org/works/18586075)  
HELL AIN'T HALF FULL (archiveofourown.org/works/18794593)  
THE LIGHT-YEARS (archiveofourown.org/works/19060417)  
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE TEENAGE DREAM (archiveofourown.org/works/19207141)  
SUBSTITUTE (archiveofourown.org/works/19310578)  
LOVE–>BUILDING ON FIRE (archiveofourown.org/works/21115067)
> 
> Roswell Week 2019 (archiveofourown.org/series/1430260)  
\- NO ALARMS AND NO SURPRISES, PLEASE   
\- EVERY DAY IS MOTHER'S DAY   
\- THIS IS HARDCORE   
\- FIRESTARTERS  
\- THE WORLD FORGETTING, BY THE WORLD FORGOT 
> 
> Guerin Week 2019 (archiveofourown.org/series/1488182)  
\- LOVING THE ALIEN   
\- YOU GOT OLDER   
\- IT'S GREAT WHEN YOU'RE STRAIGHT... YEAH   
\- I'M PRETTY FUCKED UP   
\- PUSH THE SKY AWAY   
\- BRUISE EASY   
\- INNUENDO 
> 
> thank you so much for reading <3


End file.
